Richard Gerrard

A woman and girl stand outside a small garage in an open field. Building materials and excavated earth are visible in front of and beside the garage. Garage is home until house is built, Sheppard Avenue East, Lansing. October 3, 1922. Fonds 1244, Item 2300.

Did you know? In generations past, it was not uncommon for families to start with a garage or shack to live in while they built a permanent house.

All homes have stories - join our FREE House History Workshop on March 13 to find out yours!
More info: https://ow.ly/gUPM50Yf9wB

A historian colleague of mine once blew someone’s mind after he asked “can’t you just look that up online?” and she replied “who do you think finds that stuff and puts it online?”

I held a piece of Delhi that remembers more than Delhi does.

80 feet below the ground.
Beneath concrete. Beneath drains. Beneath maps that pretend history began late.

When this layer was surface, there were no borders. No Najafgarh. No Delhi. No names.

There was a river.

Partial view of a fashion display that consists of a dark blue cotton recreation of an c18th pair of stays, skirt, underpinnings and then a view of a yellow quilted pockets

The same quilted yellow silk pocket lying flat with a slit at tue top and a tie for the waist

A full length view of the entire ensemble showing the various layers, fully clothed on one side and stripped back to show the construction on the other

This was such a clever design for a museum show. The pockets of the c18th were suspended from the waist so here, a recreation of the various layers, like an anatomical illustration. The yellow quilted pockets are original amongst the grey blue of the facsimile, #1740s #VandA #FashionHistory 🗃️🪡

OU Undergraduate Publishes New Research on Ancient Fossils Housed in the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History In a rare achievement for an undergraduate student, Colby Higdon, a geology major on the paleontology track with the University of Oklahoma has published original paleontological research conducted at...

"OU undergraduate publishes new research on ancient fossils housed in the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History" @oupaleobiology.bsky.social 🧪

Fantastic news for paleontology that the Paleontological Research Institute in Ithaca NY is staying open this year! Intensive fund-raising was successful & enough to pay off the mortgage for their building, helping to preserve this long-standing institution for national & international science. 🧪

🚫 MYTH: Only specific museum collections can be used for ESD.
✅ REALITY: Every artifact tells a story about sustainability.

There are no limits. History already holds the lessons—we just need to know where to look.

#TOWCHED #ESD #SustainableEducation

"Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

Part of a large cervid skull with thick antlers on a white background

Big news about the Toronto Subway Deer! Dug up in 1976 Torontoceros hypogaeus is a prehistoric cervid known only from 1 incomplete specimen. Originally classified as a caribou relative, ancient DNA analysis now suggests it belongs to the genus Odocoileus which includes mule deer & white-tailed deer🧪

there's a reason that my accommodations policy went from "you need to register officially with the whatever office" to "if you tell me you need accommodations, I believe you and you can have them"

it's this

Map of the City of Toronto shaded on two gradients A) from light blue-ish green to light red based on elevation and B) from light to dark showing slope of the land. The map highlights overall elevation patterns in the City, as well as highlights big river valleys and escarpments

recent map experiment of Toronto's terrain

made via QGIS/Inkscape/GIMP and TIN data from @torontoopendata.cityof.toronto.ca

higher-res here: jamaps.github.io/maps/terrain...

#toronto #maps #terrain #topography

Graphic that says I'm supporting PRI today because it's where my type specimen is with a picture of a Vermicularia (snail) apex. The PRI logo is in the bottom right and text reads www.priweb.org/donate

This #givingtuesday please consider donating to the Paleontological Research Institution/Museum of the Earth

PRI is a major US fossil collection and education center
& has been struggling after a major donor was unable to fulfill a pledge but is almost out of the woods, any support helps!
🦑⚒️🧪🐌🐚

A large (maybe 3 feet wide by 5 feet tall) sign on the end of a row of bookshelves that tells the “address” of books that have sensitive content.

Sometimes I think it’s going to be the librarians who will save us all.

"The lack is not in intelligence, which is in plentiful supply; rather, the scarce commodity is systematic training in critical thinking."

-Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science

Colour photograph of a white USB stick. Printed text on the USB stick reads: '...this is not an archive.'

Currently doing some marking. A reminder to everyone involved in archives and collections: digitisation is not preservation. If I digitise a box of records and put the files on a USB stick I haven't preserved a thing. It's all about what you do with the files post-digitisation. #archives #digipres

"I promise to question everything my leaders tell me. I promise to use my critical faculties. I promise to develop my independence of thought. I promise to educate myself so I can make my own judgements."

-Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

the post office is a public service. it doesn’t need to make money. public transit doesn’t need to make money. the library doesn’t need to make money. some things exist for the public good and we desperately need lawmakers to stop thinking about them in terms of capitalism. these are not businesses.

At the stage in manuscript editing where one coauthor adds a word and another coauthor removes the same word, and repeat. 🧪

Diagram of Darwin's day

🔆Good morning!

Dedication to work is to be admired, provided the work itself is of value, but the more of a day’s hours you devote to it, the likelier returns diminish.

Why You Should Only Work 3–4 Hours a Day,
Like Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf & Adam Smith 🧪
www.openculture.com/2025/09/why-...

A young child dressed in a green dinosaur costume with a hood shaped like a dinosaur head, playfully raising one hand like a claw. A blue text box overlay reads, “Did you pick a favorite dinosaur yet?” with Silvia Pineda-Munoz, PhD and the Climate Ages logo at the bottom.

I’m a Paleontologist

Here’s the most important tip I can give you:
Pick a favorite dinosaur and learn two facts about it

Why?

Because sooner or later, you’ll meet a child with a dinosaur book (or an obsession)

You’ll ask about their favorite
They’ll tell you why
And then, you’ll share yours
🧪 🧵

Gould was absolutely right about this. For a sobering thought, how many people on the planet now are competent taxonomists for any group of organisms? Certainly fewer than 10,000. 🧪🌍🌿⚒️🐟 #TeamFish

October 1 deadline for @nhm.org Student Collections Study Award. Get some $$ to spend time collecting data in our collections, including @tarpits.org
Open to:
- current undergraduate and grad students
- *not* local to Los Angeles (international applicants welcome)
More:
nhm.org/student-coll...
🧪

Decolonize scientific institutions, don’t just diversify them Indigenous scholars set out eight steps to stop marginalization in academia and to enable a shared Indigenous agenda in science.

In a Comment article for Nature, Indigenous scholars set out eight steps to stop marginalization in academia and to enable a shared Indigenous agenda in science. #Academicsky 🧪

This impressionistic oil painting by Katherine A. Clarke captures a quiet corner of Fort York in 1913, just as the old military post was beginning to show its age amid a rapidly industrializing Toronto. Low wooden buildings with red chimneys sit nestled in a grassy clearing, their rustic forms rendered in loose, expressive brushstrokes. The foreground is wild and untamed, with a broken fence and footpath leading the eye into the scene. In the distance, hazy outlines of factory chimneys and smoke hint at the modern city closing in on this historic site. Clarke’s work evokes both the pastoral charm and creeping urbanization that defined early 20th-century Toronto.

Fort York, Toronto, 1913

Artist: Katherine A. Clarke
Medium: Oil on canvas
Credit: Baldwin Collection of Canadiana, Toronto Public Library

#1910s #fortyork #oilpainting #Warof1812 #landscapepainting #torontoart #art #torontohistory #toronto #canada #jeremyhopkin

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

— Voltaire

If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power.

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind ..." - Right out of the Butlerian Jihad and the Orange Catholic Bible.

Who can work in science, EVERYONE #pride

The argument for letting “AI” take over education is EXACTLY the same argument as for never teaching anyone to do maths, now we have calculators.

Or it would be, if calculators sometimes gave you the wrong answer, randomly.

Collecting souvenirs isn’t new – this cowrie shell was found in an officer’s chest on the Mary Rose.